State v. Harper
| Decision Date | 12 February 1935 |
| Docket Number | 41495. |
| Citation | 258 N.W. 886,220 Iowa 515 |
| Parties | STATE v. HARPER (two cases). |
| Court | Iowa Supreme Court |
Appeal from District Court, Buena Vista County; James DeLand, Judge.
The defendant plead guilty of murder in the first degree to a county attorney's information, charging murder accomplished by means of poisoning. After hearing, the court imposed sentence of life imprisonment. Thereafter, defendant filed a " motion in arrest of judgment and for a new trial and for writ of error coram nobis or other review." This motion was stricken by the court.
Affirmed.
Salinger, Reynolds & Meyers, of Carroll, for appellant.
Edward L. O'Connor, Atty. Gen., and Walter F. Maley, Asst. Atty Gen., for the State.
Two appeals are here involved. The first from the judgment of the court imposing sentence, and the second from the refusal of the court to entertain a motion for a new trial. These appeals will be considered in the order filed.
The defendant was charged by a county attorney's information with the crime of murder in the first degree, accomplished by means of poisoning and by placing strychnine poison in the drink of the deceased. To this information he appeared in open court and orally entered a plea of guilty. In addition he filed a written plea in which he said:
" Comes now the defendant, Amos Harper, appearing both in person and by his attorney, E. M. Duroe, and enters his plea of guilty to the charge of murder in the first degree as charged in the county attorney's information filed in this cause, in that he did murder Marshall A. Lee, as alleged in said information."
Upon the filing of this plea, the court fixed a time for hearing at which sentence should be pronounced and ordered that witnesses be subpoenaed on request of the defendant at the expense of the county.
At the commencement of the hearing, the court announced that it did not care for any evidence on the question of the defendant's guilt of the crime of murder; that that was admitted by the plea of guilty; that what it wanted was information which would enable it to determine the degree of the offense and the appropriate punishment; and that it would not be technical in ruling on objections to testimony. The hearing took a rather wide range. The written confession of the defendant was put in evidence in which he stated where he bought the strychnine and how he went to the barn of the deceased, put it in bottles containing alcohol, and put the bottles back in the manger where he had found them. There was testimony also of the deceased becoming ill in the barn and being found in a helpless condition with one of these bottles open near him from which a part of the contents had been taken; that the deceased never recovered from this helpless condition; that he was found in the barn with a quantity of dirt and refuse from the barn floor in his clenched hands; that after being taken to the house he would clench the hand of his attendant as though he was experiencing a contraction of the muscles or a paroxysm of pain; and that he died some days later. There was evidence also that following the time when the deceased first became ill and when it appeared that he could not recover, that the defendant, who lived in a house on the same farm with the deceased, forged a check on his account at the bank, and that subsequently the defendant had been caught in the act of robbing a garage in the nighttime. The evidence on the part of the defendant tended to show that prior to these events, the defendant had been a young man of good habits and apparent good character, that he was twenty-three years of age and married.
At the conclusion of the hearing the court entered judgment that the defendant be confined in the penitentiary at Fort Madison for the period of his natural life at hard labor. The first appeal is from this judgment.
It is the claim of appellant that under the provisions of section 12913, Code, it was the duty of the court, after the plea of guilty had been entered, to conduct a hearing in the nature of a trial to determine the degree of guilt, and that there was error in receiving the unsworn certificate of a chemist as to the contents of the bottle found in the barn and in receiving in evidence the verdict of the coroner's jury over objections that each was hearsay and incompetent, and it is claimed that the evidence at the hearing was insufficient in that it did not establish that the defendant was guilty of murder at all, much less that he was guilty of murder in the first degree. We are thus called upon to determine the nature of the hearing which the court is required to conduct in a case of this kind and the character and amount of evidence necessary to support a sentence.
Statutes similar to our Code, § 12913, have been in force in a number of states for many years. Their effect has not been uniformly interpreted. We are cited to many cases from other jurisdictions. So far as we have been able to discover, however, none of these cases go so far as to hold, as counsel for appellant contends, that the effect of the statute is to deprive the plea of guilty of its common-law significance in establishing the commission of the crime charged, and to require proof of the commission of the crime by the defendant at the hearing before the court as though no such plea had been entered. Many cases from other jurisdictions do hold, however, that a plea of guilty entered by the defendant or a verdict of guilty returned by a jury under such a statute establishes nothing as to the degree of the crime, and that the presumption is that the crime was of the second degree and that the burden is on the state to show by competent evidence that the elements necessary to constitute first-degree murder were present and that a sentence imposing a penalty for first-degree murder will not be sustained unless it is supported by such evidence, and, further, that a verdict of a jury which does not determine the degree is fatally defective. Hall v. State, 31 Fla. 176, 12 So. 449; Casey v. State (Fla.) 156 So. 282; Davis v. State, 39 Md. 355; Jones v. Commonwealth, 75 Pa. 403; Commonwealth v. Morgenthau, 249 Pa. 139, 94 A. 551; Miller v. State, 58 Tex. Cr. R. 600, 126 S.W. 864; People v. Chew Lan Ong, 141 Cal. 550, 75 P. 186, 99 Am.St.Rep. 88; Craig v. State, 49 Ohio St. 415, 30 N.E. 1120, 16 L.R.A. 358; Reppin v. People (Colo.) 34 P.2d 71; In re Cole, 103 Neb. 802, 174 N.W. 509, 848.The early Iowa cases of McCauley v. U.S., 1 Morris, 486, and State v. Moran, 7 Iowa, 236, dealing with this statute, are in harmony with the cases to which we are referred from other jurisdictions.
All these cases, however, deal with situations where proof of actual premeditation and deliberation are required to make out first-degree murder and not with cases where the crime is committed by means or under circumstances which the statute makes first-degree murder and where no such proof of actual deliberation and premeditation is required. Counsel rely upon cases from the state of Texas. But even in that state where the jury determines the degree on a plea of guilty instead of the court, it is held that where a plea of guilty is entered charging murder in the first degree committed in the attempt to perpetrate a robbery, that it is not error for the court to direct the jury to find murder in the first degree and to fail to instruct them with reference to second- degree murder, because under the circumstances in that case there could be no murder in the second degree. The defendant was either guilty of murder in the first degree or not guilty at all. Miller v. State, 58 Tex. Cr. R. 600, 126 S.W. 864.
Cases from the state of California have also been cited by appellant as sustaining his contention. We find the same situation in that state. A statute there divides the crime of burglary into degrees and provides that, upon a plea of guilty, the court shall conduct a hearing and determine the degree. A defendant pleaded guilty to burglary in the first degree to an indictment which charged burglary generally. It was held that there was no error in the failure of the trial court to determine the degree, that the plea of guilty in the first degree disposed of the question of degree. Ex parte Haase, 5 Cal.App. 541, 90 P. 946.
It is well settled by our decisions that where an indictment or information charges murder committed by means of poisoning and there is a plea of not guilty entered, that no question of degree is involved; that the verdict of the jury in such case must be either murder in the first degree or not guilty. See State v. Bertoch, 112 Iowa, 195, 83 N.W. 967; State v. Burns, 124 Iowa, 207, 99 N.W. 721; State v. Robinson, 126 Iowa, 69, 101 N.W. 634.In other words, while the statute requires the determination of the degree by the jury in the case of a plea of not guilty and a determination of the degree by the court in case there is a plea of guilty, the statute finds no proper application in any case except in a case where the question of the degree is in issue. If there is no question of degree to be determined by a jury where the charge is murder by means of poisoning and the plea is not guilty, how can it be said that there is such an issue to be determined by the court when the plea is guilty, and, especially, where the plea is guilty of murder in the first degree as charged in the information? We do not believe that in the instant case there was any question of degree to be determined. That question was effectively determined by the information and the plea. Any attempt by the court to determine the degree from the examination of witnesses in such a case would be an idle ceremony.
But if we should concede arguendo that even in such a case the court must by...
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